Hello everyone,
Trebor asked me to join the discussion list and write a short email
introducing an essay I wrote for Digital Culture, Play, and Identity:
A World of Warcraft Reader (MIT Press, 2009). While I will be in
Norway at the time of the conference, I'm looking forward to following
your discussions, labors, and play, and appreciate the invitation to
participate.
My essay "Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft" -- available in the
book and in an earlier draft online at: <http://retts.net/documents/rettberg_corp_ideology.pdf
> is the product of a year of my life spent playing one of the
world's most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing games.
While I knew at the time I started playing the game that at the end of
the experience I would write something, I had no idea what that might
be. I joined a guild, the Truants, both as part of an academic
enterprise, and in order to spend some time with my girlfriend. At the
time I lived in New Jersey, and she lived in Norway. The guild was
composed of new media researchers, each of whom would eventually write
a chapter in the book.
While at the time I joined the guild and started playing the game, my
intent was to spend not very much time at all in the World of Warcraft
and to write something about the nature of stories within the game, to
my surprise I both ended up spending a quite ridiculous number of
hours in the game and found my interest more focused on the nature of
the attraction I felt to the activity than on the narrative content of
the experience itself. The nature of play in the game, I argue in the
essay and I'm sure any player will tell you, is labor, and often of a
very repetitive nature. What surprised me is that in World of Warcraft
and in other sorts of play enterprises like it, the repetitive labor,
the token economy in which it is couched, the fellowship of fellow
laborers, and the accelerated sure and steady rise up the virtual
corporate ladder are the most compelling and addictive aspects of the
gameplay. I argue in the essay that the game is both training for
participation in corporate structures and a contemporary manifestation
of the protestant work ethic. A particular kind of fun, avoidance of
"the real" by immersion in a fairy tale of capitalism.
Both the essay and the game are more complex and hopefully more
entertaining than this reduction. But I agree with what I take to be
the basic premise of this conference: that play and work have become
conflated in interesting ways: that perhaps in the contemporary period
our ideas of leisure become convoluted, the borders between digital
work and play blurred to the extent that we can no longer distinguish
between them. Play becomes a manifestation of our interpellation in
the world of 24/7 real time labor/consumption (consumption having
become an aspect of labor and labor an aspect of consumption).
Sisyphus might have ultimately been convinced to pay a monthly fee for
the pleasure of pushing that rock up the hill.
I look forward to following the discussion and wish you a great
conference.
All the Best,
Scott Rettberg